From Nero’s decadent Golden House in Rome to Charles Fourier’s orgiastic French “courts of love”; public toilet glory holes to Eileen Gray’s sex
Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
Tom Wilkinson
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
Justin McGuirk
At first glance, the only visible connection between these two lively books is a bridge between Rio de Janeiro and Rocinha, the South American city’s biggest favela, shaped in the guise of a woman’s G-stringed bottom. This, however, proves to be revealing, for both Tom Wilkinson’s revisionist passeggiata through architectural history and Justin McGuirk’s hike through the slums and outer suburbs of Latin American cities seem bent, provocatively, on turning accepted notions of architecture and the values of the profession that serves it upside down and inside out. Wilkinson quotes Oscar Niemeyer, the long-lived Brazilian architect who designed some of the most sensuous buildings of the 20th century: “Life is more important than architecture.”
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Radical Cities waves a reddish flag for South and Central American architects and activists dedicated to building well for the rapidly increasing urban poor. On a fast-paced trip through the region—airports, motorbikes and taxis “tearing along” highways abound – McGuirk contrasts the largely failed architect-designed estates of the 1960s and 1970s that he finds on the edges of sprawling cities with recent attempts to reinvent the favelas of Rio and the barrios of Caracas.
A bold attempt to offer a semblance of a middle-class, “country club” life to those who might otherwise live in shanty towns, Alto Comedero is, McGuirk writes, brave and intriguing but ultimately no solution to the problem of urban slums. What could be, however, is Torre David, an empty office tower in downtown Caracas that, in 2007, became the world’s tallest squat.
It is a dangerous and exhausting place to live. Yet, McGuirk argues, why not allow people to come in from failed estates such as Piedrabuena to live in redundant city-centre skyscrapers? Here is an example of the “diagonal city” of the 21st century, cutting across social divisions, as well as an instance of the “iconic” design that McGuirk so despises working to the benefit of the urban poor.
Both of these young authors have something to say, although perhaps they and their readers should be reminded that architecture is an ancient discipline, a continuum that absorbs and rejects new ideas, conjectures, philosophies and aberrations. In the end, what remain when life, slums, sex and the architects have gone—whether those of ancient Rome, or Renaissance Florence, or modern Rio de Janeiro—are the stones themselves. We can read anything into these that we like. At their best, these books keep us from complacency, while provoking us to look again at both historic monuments and exotic slums.